"Edward VIII - The Lion King" --- Documentary 2013 - YouTube Video

[Mark A Ouellette]

Folks,

The link below is to a YouTube video documentary of Prince Edward VIII's journey from adventurer big game hunter to conservationist. This video is somewhat anti-hunting and pro photo safari but it is very much worth watching!

Prince Edward witnessed the introduction of the motor car to East Africa and tourists shooting many animals from them.
- I wonder if his reaction to that invoked the same reaction many of us traditional hunters think and feel about modern long-range shooting of game animals from over 500 yards? Think about it.

Albeit has an anti-hunting slant, this documentary is worthy of discussion.

 

[Altitude sickness]

I’ll pull that up on the TV and watch it Mark. Thanks

 

[Hunter-Habib]

Speaking for myself, I still hunt mostly with iron sights and prefer taking shots under 200 yards (both for dangerous game AND plains game).

That said, if a hunter prefers to take shots on game out to 500 yards... Then, more power to him. Whatever floats his boat.

As long as the game was taken in a sustainable manner, every usable part of the animal was utilized & chances of the game escaping wounded are kept at a minimum... I won't begrudge a fellow hunter for his style of hunting.

Hunting is very much a hobby of individual style & sporting ethics. And no two hunter can ever have the example same set of ethics.

Take John Pondoro Taylor, for instance. Widely respected in our hunting community. But he advocated for a ban on magazine rifles being used for big game hunting due to them being "Unsporting". I can't say that I agree with him.

Or Mark Sullivan who happens to be be a friend of mine, but considers using a telescopic sighted bolt action rifle for hunting Cape buffalo to be "Assassination". I don't agree with him on this matter either, but (to put matters into perspective) his critics find his "Up close & personal" approach to hunting Cape buffalo to be unethical. I won't pass comment on this.

All I'll say is that everybody deserves a right to hunt the way they please, as long as the hunt is done sustainably without any scope for wounded game to escape.

A fun bit of trivia: When I hunted in Kenya in 1974 on my life's first safari... I had the good fortune to visit the fabled gun shop "Shaw & Hunter" in Nairobi. I had a very interesting conversation with the elderly British shop clerk about the (then) current trend in rifles. He commented about how even ten years back... the idea of using telescopic sights was perceived as "Dishonorable" by most hunters (a notion he seemed to agree with). But how the "Fat lazy Americans" had now made telescopic sights common in Kenya by bringing them on Safaris, simply because they could not properly stalk game. I found his views to be ... quite radical (to put it politely).

50 years later, look how times have changed.